by Michael Foss
He had given her the library of Pergamon containing 200,000 scrolls; at a banquet before a large company he had risen from his place, and at the whim of some wager or jest had anointed her feet; he had permitted the Ephesians to salute her as their own queen, even in his presence; and on many occasions, seated in a tribunal to give justice to kings and tetrarchs, he had received love letters from her on tablets of onyx or crystal, and he had read them through in the full face of the public.
By implication, this was clearly degenerate conduct by a man drunk with lust for the Egyptian sorceress, a Roman no longer worthy of the name.
But still Antony delayed. Was it the difficulty of putting together the expedition, or the caresses of Cleopatra that held him back? In April 32 BC they moved to the island of Samos, a step closer to Italy. Octavian was collecting his fleet at Tarentum and Brundisium across the Adriatic. He was also strengthening his hold on Italy, recently shaken by the outcry against his taxes. Each town in Italy swore a conjuratio, a solemn oath of allegiance to Octavian, and this oath was repeated in the provinces of the West as far apart as North Africa and Gaul.
In May, Antony removed the base of his operations to Athens, a place of poignant and impressive memories for both him and Cleopatra. For it was in this most famous of ancient western cities that Cleopatra found the roots of her Ptolemaic Greek culture; and it was here that Antony and Octavia had spent the brief interval of their married days together, where both had been much reverenced by the Athenians.
The propaganda of insult between the opponents continued, drawing from Antony an outraged reply when he was accused of being a drunken sot. He was so riled that he answered with a little pamphlet from his own hand entitled De ebrietate sua (‘On his Drunkenness’). To help them forget this and other unpleasantness, a statue of Cleopatra as Isis was placed on the Acropolis, next to the figure of Antony as Dionysus. But the memory of Octavia still lingered in Athens, and Cleopatra wished to rid herself of this ghost from the past. She prevailed on Antony to send Octavia a bill of divorcement, forcing her to quit Antony’s house in Rome with her little flock of children, both his and hers, clinging about her.
Into the winter of 32 BC the rumour in Rome still played on the debauchery of the lovers frittering time away in Athens. It was said that Cleopatra poisoned the atmosphere of Antony’s court, making men jumpy and discontented and ready to run away.
Coin depicting both Antony and Cleopatra, issued in Asia Minor 32–31 BC.
Her parasites [wrote Plutarch] drove away many friends of Antony who found the drunken antics and foolishness of these creatures more than they could stand. Many left at this time including Dellius the historian, who was told by Glaucus the physician that Cleopatra was plotting against his life. It seems that he had offended her at dinner when he complained at the sour wine, while [he said] even Octavian’s favourite page, a pretty boy, was drinking Falernian in Rome.
Weather, not debauchery, was delaying the expedition. Antony had missed the last sailing season, and naval operations did not begin in the winter. Antony’s force was marking time in Athens, according to normal military practice, but Octavian was eager to suggest more sinister explanations:
Octavian also made it known that Antony was befuddled by drugs, no longer master of his actions, and that Rome would fight this war against the eunuch Mardian, against Pothinus, Iras the queen’s hairdresser, and Charmian her waiting-woman, for it was they who governed Antony’s empire now.
Whatever the expected opposition, Octavian was taking no chances, making careful military preparations and giving legal form and substance to all his war-like actions. His plans were almost complete. One of his generals was sent to guard North Africa, roving naval squadrons kept watch along the coasts of Spain and Gaul. He put his chief counsellor Maecenas in charge of Rome and Italy. The main fleet, under the command of Agrippa and Octavian himself, waited in the ports of southern Italy for the passing of the winter storms.
In January 31 BC Octavian became consul for the third time, the highest republican office in Rome that he was due to share with Antony. But Octavian now had the government of the West so firmly in his hands that he was able to impose upon the senate to strike Antony out of the triumvirate and to bar him from the consulship. Then Octavian, as priest of the Roman people, went in solemn procession to the temple of Bellona, Goddess of War. Outside the temple, on the Field of Mars, he hurled a blood-tipped spear in the direction of the enemy and declared justum bellum – a just war – against Cleopatra only. In this way he preserved the fiction that the coming struggle was not an episode in the long-running civil war. That great Roman unhappiness, according to the official propaganda, had been brought to an end through the state-manship of Octavian in 36 BC. This new war was a patriotic response to an invasion by an Egyptian queen.
Now the clash of arms could no longer be prevented. Both sides were committed beyond return. The new year came in with signs and portents, as if nature herself mirrored the agitation in the state. The message of the gods was written in the skies and etched into the earth, and it was a matter of desperate importance for mankind to read it right.
Pisaurum, a city colonized by Antony on the coast of the Adriatic, was shattered by earthquake. A statue of Antony in Alba did sweat continually, though wiped dry again and again. At Patras, the temple of Heracles was struck by lightning and burnt. In Athens, a statue of Dionysus was torn loose from its place in the War of the Giants and hurled by the storm into the theatre. Now, Antony claimed to be descended from Heracles, and since the manner of his life resembled that of Dionysus, men called him also the New Dionysus. This same storm, moreover, toppled the colossal statues in Athens of Eumenes and Attalus, those called ‘the Antonians’, while other figures nearby went undisturbed. And lastly, a dreadful sign appeared on Cleopatra’s flagship, the Antonias. Swallows had nested under the stern, but others attacked them, drove them out, and killed their young.
If the gods had spoken, as the people of the age devoutly believed, then the portents were ominous for Antony.
7
ACTIUM AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY
OLD HISTORIES often assign large effects to slight causes, seeing the fall of empires implicit in a single sin, in human weakness, faults and wrong steps. Unlike the ancients or Pascal, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, who found historical consequences in the length of Cleopatra’s nose, today we put our explanatory faith in the interplay of economic forces, social aims, patterns of material production, class structures, demographic change and the like. But Pascal was not wholly wrong. Unforeseen events flow from vagaries of character, and private whims may lead to the death of thousands.
All the world knew that Cleopatra and Antony were vulnerable humans, but in what way were they guilty of characteristic sins? The Roman philosopher Seneca judged Antony to be a great man who ‘was led astray into foreign ways and un-Roman vices by his love of drink and his equal passion for Cleopatra’. The poet Horace, friend of Maecenas and supporter of Octavian but too sunny a temperament for vindictive abuse, thought that Cleopatra’s mind had become ‘clouded and disordered by Mareotic wine’. In the final pages of Plutarch, as the end approached for Antony and Cleopatra, there are many stories of gloomy carousing in a court vacillating between false hopes and despair. Antony had undermined his strong frame from a young age, turning night into day and reeling home at sun-up. He was now over fifty and his thickening waist was a measure of thickening wits. He was not without energy or capacity, but now they came intermittently in smaller loads dredged from a muddied well. He was on the last track to an uncertain destination, carried forward by the devils of his past. The taunt of tipsy revelry stung Antony, no doubt because it was largely true; it was the only accusation that he deigned to defend at length, in his De ebrietate sua.
With Cleopatra, there is no evidence of drunkenness. She also did the night rounds in Alexandria, but so far as one can see she drank cunningly, keeping Antony company, to entrap him in a web of i
ndulgence. She wore on her finger a ring bearing a picture of Methe, goddess of drunkenness, but set in an amethyst, the stone of sobriety. This was a paradox of eastern mysticism, a celebration of the Sober Drunkenness propounded in her own Alexandria by the Jewish mystical philosopher Philo. This elated state was very far from the stupid excess of an alcoholic, rather it was a Dionysian initiation into a state of ecstatic joy that had the raised consciousness given by drink without its disgusting and enfeebling misery. In wearing the ring of Methe, Cleopatra was declaring her mastery over the goddess, not her subservience.
The second part of the charge in Seneca’s indictment, that Antony had lost himself out of ‘passion for Cleopatra’, had much truth in it. Their affair, which had begun with calculated policy on her side and an insouciant desire for lust, luxury and possession on his, had developed into an entanglement of the whole person, so that neither quite knew where the domain of the one ended and the other began. They had come to need each other, beyond sex, beyond excitement, but desperately, and as in all desperate compulsions there was as much pain in it as pleasure. What had begun as a sordid adventure had grown into a heartfelt tragedy, for neither could go on without the other, and yet neither could succeed with the other. Their joint ambition, to be co-rulers of a Roman-Egyptian world, was impossible without each other, but could never be realized with each other.
Antony needed Cleopatra for very practical reasons. Almost alone in the East, she had the money and the resources to finance and supply his challenge to Octavian. And her efficient help for Antony showed her competence as queen of Egypt. Ship-building, provision of the fleet, storage and movement of very large amounts of grain, transport, payment for men and material, all fell to Cleopatra, and she managed these tasks despite the seasonal difficulties of Egyptian agriculture and the turmoil of the Roman wars just beyond her borders. When there was a shortage of timber for the new ships, the docks at Berytos in the Lebanon were placed under Egyptian administration, to organize the felling and supply of cedars from the interior. All this was done by her authority, her single voice in command of the centralized Ptolemaic bureaucracy. In Athens, when she stood by Antony at the gathering of the fleet and the armies, Cleopatra was a regal presence demanding a recognition that was owed to her on account of the history of her famous house, her own fame, her successful experience as a monarch, and her equal commitment to the dream she shared with Antony.
But Antony feared to give her this recognition, for he knew as a Roman that if he wished to govern in Rome he could not do so under the colours of an oriental despotism, which the traditions of republican Rome hated and despised. In Rome, support for a leader was freely given and freely withdrawn. A great man made an unwritten contract with the citizens, or with a portion of them, which was paid out on their part in loyalty. That loyalty was not to be taken for granted, and no one, however exalted his position or strong his army, had an automatic right to service. When Octavian tried to recruit Asinius Pollio to his cause, that upright, much-admired man replied, ‘My services to Antony are too great and his kindnesses to me too well known for me to take your part in the quarrel, so I shall keep out of it and be the prize for the victor.’ Octavian accepted this, for it was the old Roman way.
If Antony wished to carry his Roman followers with him, they must go through their own free choice. His best advisers were counselling him to leave Cleopatra behind at Ephesus, to try to minimize her part in the grand scheme. As long as she was seen as co-leader of the campaign, he did not dare invade Italy, for then his generals and his legions might melt away. Yet without her, he could not withstand Octavian, for she provided the sinews of his war and their imperial dream belonged to both of them. To this dilemma may be ascribed many of the military misjudgements and errors, from a soldier of Antony’s experience, that have long puzzled historians. Antony delayed and delayed because he could not be seen to invade Italy. He had to force Octavian to attack him, and so bring the war out of Italy. He chose to rely on his fleet, which was as much Egyptian as Roman, because he could not put a wholehearted trust in his legions, though he had more money and more men than Octavian. Between the decline of his powers and his excessive reliance on Cleopatra, Antony was caught morose, perplexed, inconsistent. As the initiative began to leak away so too did his supporters, and he was not sure how to react. When his friend Ahenobarbus deserted he put on a nonchalant public face, scoffing that his old companion was fleeing to a mistress in Rome. In secret, despite the protests of Cleopatra, he sent the man’s belongings and servants after him. But when the client-prince Iamblichus tried to desert, Antony caught him and executed him as an example.
In expectation of the spring campaign in 31 BC, Antony placed his command headquarters at Patras in Greece and formed a line of defence along the western coast of Albania and Greece. He had a large army of 19 legions as well as auxiliaries from the eastern client-kingdoms. In all, he had about 70,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. A few legions were left to guard his rear, thinly spread from North Africa to the Bosphorus. But his main effort, and most of Cleopatra’s money, had been put into the fleet. This was another acknowledgement of his debt to Cleopatra, for Egypt had always relied on naval power while Romans much preferred to fight on land using the formidable, well-tried strength of the legions. The queen was paying for the campaign, but was it wise to let her make the military choices? Plutarch thought that the strategy shamed Antony:
Although Antony was far stronger than Octavian on land, merely to please the queen he wished to give the victory to the fleet, even though his ships were so undermanned that his captains had to waylay and impress travellers, muleteers, farmers, and even young boys from the fields of Greece.
Coin issued in 32–31 BC depicting a Roman galley, of a type probably in use at the Battle of Actium.
Antony’s fleet of some 500 warships was as large and powerful as the ancient world had ever seen. Noting the success of Agrippa’s heavily built ships against Sextos Pompeius, Cleopatra’s shipwrights had gone one better than Agrippa, constructing giant floating castles with as many as ten rowers to an oar. The sides of the ships were protected by baulks of timber bound with iron, and in the prow of each was a tremendous bronze beak for ramming, for the chief tactics of a Mediterranean sea-fight were to ram, grapple and board the enemy. These vessels were hugely powerful, but also slow, awkward and almost unmanageable with poorly trained crews. Octavian’s admiral Agrippa, on the contrary, having battered Sextos to defeat with brute force, now showed his naval genius by going to the other extreme. To complement his big ships, he quickly had built a large number of smaller, faster, more agile galleys based on a ship used by Adriatic pirates and known as a Liburnian. These were cheap, easy to construct and light to handle, even with inexperienced crews.
Octavian’s ships [Plutarch wrote in retrospect] were not built for pomp or ostentatious show but were well-manned, fast and easy to manoeuvre.
The conduct of Antony’s campaign has been a mystery to most later writers. Whereas Antony was dilatory, confused and careless, Octavian was swift, sure and decisive. Octavian acted, Antony merely reacted; and as so often the luck ran with the bold. Octavian’s fleet set out from southern Italy early in 31 BC and made a number of fast, punitive strikes, both by land and sea, along the line of Antony’s defences. Having turned the northern end of these defences, Octavian landed his army in Epirus and almost before Antony had drawn breath this army was on the northern headland of the Gulf of Ambracia, threatening the anchorage of Antony’s fleet within the gulf. Antony came hurriedly from Patras and established a position on the southern headland, by the temple of Apollo at Actium. Both armies began to dig in and fortify; but in the rear Agrippa’s raiders took Corinth and Patras, closing off the lower Greek mainland from Antony, and preventing the Egyptian supply-ships from getting through to his fleet. The two armies faced each other across the kilometre-wide mouth of the gulf, and Agrippa’s pack of light galleys, like hunting dogs on a cornered stag, began a blockade of th
e fleet in the shelter of the gulf.
There was little concern on Antony’s side at the first reverses. When Octavian landed in Epirus and took the town of Toryne, Cleopatra laughed, saying, ‘Who cares if he has a ladle in his hands?’, for toryne meant ladle in Greek. But as summer advanced the position was serious for Antony. His army had been idle for too long, camping for some time in low-lying malarial ground, and many soldiers were sick. Now there was an entrenched stalemate on land and Antony’s supply-route was cut at sea. Food began to be scarce and provisions had to be dragged over the bitter country of the Greek mountains by mule and even on porters’ backs. Plutarch related how his own great-grandfather had struggled under the lash towards Actium with a sack of corn on his shoulders. The besiegers, who had hoped to tie down Octavian’s smaller army, were now besieged, and desertions from Antony’s ranks went from a trickle to a flow. The eastern client-kings felt the advantage shift and ghosted away to an uneasy reception from Octavian. ‘I like treason,’ he told one of these princes, ‘but I don’t like traitors.’ Still the haemorrhage of men continued. Amyntas of Galatia crossed over with his 2000 men, and this was the time also when Dellius and Ahenobarbus, both old companions, deserted. Time was running out but Antony could not make up his mind. His cumbersome fleet had been no use to him so far. His senior officers were telling him to abandon both his fleet and Cleopatra, to withdraw his army into Thrace or Macedonia, territories he knew well and where he had local sympathy, and to put the campaign to the test of a land battle.